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Usenix LISA 2013 Presentations about DevOps:

Sunday, Nov 3, 2013:

• 9am-5pm:
• SRE Classroom: Non-Abstract Large System Design for Sysadmins
• John Looney, Google
• Format: Full Day Training Class

Learn how Google SRE build and run huge systems. Google SREs were doing DevOps for years before the term "DevOps" was coined. John Looney is a Google SRE that created training programs inside Google to train more SREs. This is a "don't miss" session.

• 9am-5pm:
• Real-World Configuration Management
• Format: Workshop: mixture of discussions and presentations

This workshop is an annual event at Usenix LISA. In past years this is where CfEngine was debated and Puppet was born. The last one had excellent presentations and I learned a lot. I see forsee good things here this year too.

• 1:30 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
• The Practical Gamemaster: Hands-On Design and Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills
• Format: Workshop: Hands on

A half-day workshop on running "Game Day" exercises. That like a firedrill for your service: take down random machines and make sure everything keeps running.

Monday, Nov 4, 2013:

• 9:00 am-12:30 pm
• Building a Big IaaS Cloud: Building a Massively Scalable, Geographically Disparate, IaaS Cloud Using Apache CloudStack
• David Nalley, Apache CloudStack
• Format: Half Day Training Class

• 9am-5pm:
• Cloud
• Format: Workshop

While the title is positively vague, the description is clear that this is for people that run private clouds (or want to).

Tuesday, Nov 5, 2013:

• 9am-12:30pm:
• Advanced Time Management: Team Efficiency
• Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange
• Format: Half Day Training Class

Realizing that DevOps is all about working as a team, I've rewritten this half-day training to be all examples from working in DevOps organizations. People from traditional enterprise orgs will still learn a lot.

• 1:30am-5pm:
• Evil Genius 101
• Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange
• Format: Half Day Training Class

First time at LISA! The first half of this class is all about applying DevOps techniques in the enterprise and everywhere. The second half is sneaky underhanded ways to convince people to adopt your ideas.

"You want to innovate: deploy new technologies such as configuration management (CFEngine, Puppet, Chef), a wiki, or standardized configurations. Your coworkers don't want change. They like it the way things are. Therefore, they consider you evil. However you aren't evil; you just want to make things better."

• 9am-12:30pm:
• Continuous Integration with Jenkins
• Joshua Jensen, Sirius Computer Solutions
• Format: Half Day Training Class

Nothing says "improved devops flow" like Continuous Integration. Jenkins is an amazing open source product that will let you apply CI to building software as well many other sysadmin tools (I use something like Jenkins to push DNS updates!)

• 9am-12:30pm:
• Disaster Recovery Plans: Design, Implementation and Maintenance Using the ITIL Framework
• Jeanne Schock, Afilias
• Format: Half Day Training Class

If you remember Ben Rockwood's 2010 keynote he said ITIL has tons of great ideas that every DevOps engineer should know.

• 9am-5pm:
• Metrics
• Format: Workshop

Brendan Gregg is a metrics god! I want to attend this just to bask in his monitorific glow!

• 9am-5pm:
• Systems Workflow
• Format: Workshop

Get your agile/devops flow on!

Wednesday, Nov 6, 2013:

• 9:00am-5:00pm
• Introduction to Chef
• Nathen Harvey, Opscode
• Format: Full Day Training Class

What better way to learn Chef than directly from Opscode!

• 11:00 am-12:30pm
• Our Jobs Are Evolving: Can We Keep Up?
• Mandi Walls, Senior Consultant, Opscode Inc.
• Format: Invited Talk

DevOps diva Mandi Walls talking about what skills you'll need in the future. If you want to learn about DevOps culture there are few better to learn from.

• 11:45 am-12:30pm
• Becoming a Gamemaster: Designing IT Emergency Operations and Drills
• Adele Shakal, Director, Project & Knowledge Management, Metacloud, Inc.
• Format: Invited Talk

Adele will share what she's learned from running "game day" disaster recovery firedrills in IT shops. If you're familiar with the DevOps "anti-fragile" concept, this will be good training for you.

• 11:00 am-12:30pm
• A Working Theory-of-Monitoring
• Caskey L. Dickson, Site Reliability Engineer, Google Inc.
• Format: Invited Talk

Caskey knows more about monitoring than ... everyone. His systems monitor more elements than he can say in public. Believe me. See this. You will want to apply everything he says to your monitoring system no matter how big or small.

• 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
• User Space
• Noah Zoschke, Sr. Platform Engineer, Heroku
• Format: Invited Talk

While the title is positively vague, the description is clear that this is about Heroku's innovative (dare I say "radical"?) ideas about the layering problems in cloud and hosted computing and how to solve them.

• 4:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
• Live Upgrading Thousands of Servers from an Ancient Red Hat Distribution to 10 Year Newer Debian Based One
• Marc Merlin, Google, Inc.
• Format: Paper and Report

I'm biased because I shepherded this paper. Check it out: Google ran RedHat on its zillions-they-won't-say-how-many computers. Marc and his team was charged with converting them all to Debian. You'd think they'd reload them one at a time. No, for reasons he'll explain that wasn't permitted. So instead they changed one file at a time until the machines were running Debian. Yes. Really. It's an amazing story. There are lessons to be learned here whether or not you ever think you'll be in this situation. You will learn more about testing and, heck, "being careful", in these 30 minutes than in the rest of your career.

There are 3 other talks at the same time. All are great DevOps talks (storage performance, key-value at large scale, hadoop) but I'm not going to describe them because you should all see Marc's talk. (And OMG those other three talks are awesome DevOps-y goodness. Buy a clone. Send them to see the other talks. I mean it.)

• 4:45 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
• Observing and Understanding Behavior in Complex Systems
• Theo Schlossnagle, CEO, Circonus
• Format: Invited Talk

Remember earlier when I said Caskey knows more about monitoring that anyone I know. I forgot about Theo. Theo is tied with Caskey.

Thursday, Nov 7, 2013:

• 9:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
• Data Engineering for Complex Systems
• Hilary Mason, bitly
• Format: Plenary Session

Hilary is the data scienist that founded bit.ly. You definitely want to hear her speak. She'll keep it short. (ha ha, get it? Gosh, I bet she's never heard that before.)

• 11:00 p.m.-12:30 p.m.
• Women in Advanced Computing
• Moderator: Rikki Endsley, USENIX Association, Panelists: Amy Rich, Mozilla Corporation; Deanna McNeil, Learning Tree International; Amy Forinash
• Format: Panel

Last year the men that attended this panel learned more than the women. Don't miss it!

• 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
• LEAN Operations: Applying 100 Years of Manufacturing Knowledge to Modern IT
• Ben Rockwood, Joyent
• Format: Invited Talk

DevOps is LEAN applied to system administration. Ben's keynote kicked ass at LISA 2010. I look forward to seeing this presentation.

• 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
• Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs
• Brendan Gregg, Joyent
• Format: Invited Talk

If you missed Brendan Gregg's workshop, you won't want to miss his talk about "flame graphs".

• 4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
• Drifting into Fragility
• Matt Provost, Weta Digital
• Format: Invited Talk

• 4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
• A Guide to SDN: Building DevOps for Networks
• Rob Sherwood, Big Switch
• Format: Invited Talk

SDN is way cool.

Friday, Nov 9, 2013:

• 9:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
• Time Management for System Administrators
• Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange
• Format: "Guru" Session

This is my "Ask Me Anything" session on Time Management. Last year the turn-out was huge. I'm not saying that to brag; I'm just saying you should come early because last year they turned away people.

• 9:00am-5:00pm
• Introduction to Puppet Enterprise
• James Sweeny, Puppet Labs
• Format: Full Day Training Class

What better way to learn Puppet Enterprise than directly from Puppet Labs!

• 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
• Managing Macs at Google Scale
• Clay Caviness and Edward Eigerman, Google Inc.
• Invited Talk

Clay and Ed manage Macs like DevOps manage massive web services. The difference is that Clay and Ed probably manage more computers than most cloud services dream of having. If you manage Macs, don't miss this!

• 2:00 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
• Cloud/IaaS Platforms: I/O Virtualization and Scheduling
• Dave Cohen, Office of the CTO, EMC
• Invited Talk

One of the most difficult things about running large services is I/O. I look forward to this talk.

• 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
• Scaling User Security: Lessons Learned from Shipping Security Features at Etsy
• Zane Lackey, Director of Security Engineering, and Kyle Barry, Security Engineering Manager, Etsy
• Invited Talk

DevOps applied to security. Awesome.

• 2:45 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
• Cluster Management at Google
• John Wilkes, Google
• Invited Talk

This talk will include a lot about Omega. If you have heard of Mesos, this is what they're trying to clone.

• 4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
• PostOps: A Non-Surgical Tale of Software, Fragility, and Reliability
• Todd Underwood, Google
• Closing Plenary

Todd is one of the funniest and best managers at Google. This talk will include his take on DevOps and how to end "toil".